


The Stars Aren't Crossed

by TheArrow



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 04, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, I Just Actually Needed An Excuse To Write About Poetry More
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-07-26 22:36:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7592881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheArrow/pseuds/TheArrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On A <s>Brief</s> Hiatus — Not Abandoned</p>
<p>Sometime right after Season 4's "Something Blue", Buffy unexpectedly fails a midterm. Between Oz leaving, Spike being chipped, and Willow casting the spell that turns her and Spike into a smoochfest, not to mention the regular nightly slayage, Buffy finds herself needing a tutor for one of her college courses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Foolish Notion

Mortal, if thou art beloved  
Life's offences are removed;  
All the fateful things that checked thee,  
Hearten, hallow, and protect thee.  
Grow'st thou mellow? What is age?  
Tinct on life's illumined page,  
Where the purple letters glow  
Deeper, painted long ago.  
What is sorrow? Comfort's prime,  
Love's choice Indian summer clime.  
Sickness!—thou wilt pray it worse  
For so blessed, balmy nurse.  
And for death! when thou art dying  
'Twill be Love beside thee lying.  
Death is lonesome? Oh, how brave  
Shows the foot-frequented grave!  
Heaven itself is but the casket  
For Love's treasure, ere he ask it,—  
Ere with burning heart he follow,  
Piercing through corruption's hollow.  
If thou art beloved, oh then  
Fear no grief from mortal men.  
— _Beloved_ by Michael Field

Hold on as we crash into the earth  
A bit of pain will help you suffer when you're hurt, for real  
'Cause you were driving me crazy  
— _After Midnight_ by Blink 182

 

Buffy had been performing rather well in her psychology so far this semester, and it had given her a small confidence boost with regards to college life in general. So it came as an unpleasant surprise, upon exiting her poetry class that evening, when she found herself staring at a hugely disappointing “F” stamped on the cover of her midterm. Her mind was reeling in frustration and surprise, and at the fact that she was stuck in this class, a survey course introducing the students to nineteenth century English poetry. Unfortunately, while Buffy’s intuition and curiosity was giving her an effective edge in psychology, it was not giving her any bonus points in this literature class. It also hardly seemed fair that the only midterm in this class happened so far after the drop date. She wouldn’t be allowed to switch to another class last minute, or even simply drop the class because of the failing incomplete denotation the college would put on her transcript. Some days, Buffy found college very similar to high school, in that it didn’t feel like a big deal. Other days, Buffy felt like she was barely treading water. Wasn’t her freshman semester supposed to be easy? She’d tried to pick classes that would work with an open-ended liberal arts major, and everyone had assured her that a poetry survey class was going to be a good first course to ease her into a college routine.

It’s not that Buffy didn’t like poetry. She liked poetry as much as the next person, but this class was involving a lot more history than she thought it would—not to mention the odd incomprehensible turns of phrases that were all the latest rage back in 1858—and she felt slightly trapped by the prospect of a semester-long snoozefest that was going to bring down her grade-point average by more than she really wanted to deal with right now.

A Scooby meeting at Giles’ had been scheduled right after her last class, and so Buffy left campus without stopping or meandering. She rearranged her shoulder bag and enjoyed the walk through the dimming, but still quite warm, daylight. She probably had at least an hour before sunset, and already the light from the sky was taking on that warm orange glow of a typical fall Californian evening. Willow had promised to come without needing to be picked up, so Buffy headed straight to her former Watcher’s apartment instead of dropping by the dorm on the way to the meeting. It was, Buffy admitted to herself reluctantly, a relief that Willow was finally leaving their dorm room without needing to be bribed or convinced. It was not really her fault, since the whole Oz-thing, but basket-case Willow was difficult to live with—not to mention heartbreaking. It was hard to watch Willow cry, and it was also difficult to watch Willow try to will herself to feel nothing at all, lying in bed and listening to soft folk music for hours on end.

Buffy thought of the last few weeks, especially since Oz left, and despite herself she couldn’t stop herself from grinning a little. Mostly, her grin was because she’d just remembered her bizarre Thanksgiving truce with Spike. Spike’s recent “condition” had been a constant source of mirth for her, one she let herself enjoy with the kind of childish vengefulness that she was sure made Anya somewhat proud. But what a strange turn in events! When she thought of the first time she’d met Spike, on that fateful Parent-Teacher night at the old high school, she remembered experiencing a different kind of fear from the one that she’d felt in her early years as a slayer, learning of the prophecy of her own death and facing the Master. With Spike that night, she had been terrified: mostly for her mother, but also because she was trying to take care of so many people still in the school and trying to survive, as well as not blowing her secret super-hero identity and trying not to get kicked out of high school. She always knew she had a responsibility to protect people, even _all_ people, but it wasn’t often that she had to do it in such a direct manner. She’d been excited, too, because taking on Spike had felt like a whole new level of kickass. It had been so very entertaining, in an almost twisted way, to see him chained to Giles’ bathtub, whining about blood and his soap operas. She had not been able to help herself from teasing him, at least until Willow accidentally—

Her meandering thoughts were cut short as she turned into the street where her former Watcher lived. She quickened the pace, and arrived in the courtyard outside Giles’ apartment in no time. From here, ringing in the stone of the courtyard, voices echoed from inside. Someone must be having an argument, and it was probably about Spike.

Buffy realised then that she was still holding her failed assignment in her hand. She quickly folded it over twice, until it was nothing but a thick square of paper that she could easily tuck into the back pocket of her jeans. Taking in a deep breath, she knocked on the front door.

It was Xander who greeted her. The grumpy look on his face eased a little when he saw Buffy. “Hey Buff. Welcome to the crazy house.”

“Thanks, Xander.” Buffy said as she came inside, taking off her shoulder bag and leaving it by the coat stand by the door.

“Oh Buffy thank goodness,” Giles was at his desk, his forehead glistening, the shadow of a beard just beginning to colour his jaw. He looked disgruntled and decidedly not like his usual self. He had probably not been using his bathroom much in the past few days. “Come tell this, this, blood-sucking _fiend_ to behave himself and shut up. I can’t take much more of this nonsense.”

Buffy took a look at Giles’ living room and wondered about the mess. Spike was not strapped to a chair, so Buffy figured he was probably chained up in the washroom. She did notice that Giles’ collection of LPs and musics cassettes were somewhat ransacked and tossed around, as if somebody had been going through each one and not bothered to put them back properly.

“What did he do?” Buffy asked Giles in a serious tone. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Willow sitting in an armchair, looking more than a little dejected and disconnected, hugging her knees to her chest.

“Oh, he nicked the key to his chains while I wasn’t looking,” Buffy could feel her heart speed up momentarily, since a loose Spike was likely to be very bad news, “and now he’s—”

Giles was interrupted by a crash in his kitchen. Buffy turned around to see Spike muttering to himself and looking at the floor.

“Sorry, my bad.” He was holding up a broken mug, one of Giles’ nicer ones that belonged to a tea set he’d brought over from England. “Damn. Was a nice one too,” he said to himself, loud enough for the assembled Scoobies to hear. Giles threw the vampire an exasperated look, not much different from the look he occasionally still gave Buffy, Willow and Xander whenever they acted like immature teenagers in his presence.

“That is the second one today, Spike!”

“Not my fault you cram your cabinets so full that to get at anything interesting I knock things over…by accident of course.”

Buffy gave her former Watcher a funny look.

“Oh shut up, Spike, and stop behaving like a bull in a china shop.” Giles answered, trying not to get overly worked up by the vampire’s actions. Getting angry at Spike would achieve nothing, especially in their current situation. Giles glanced back down at the text in his hands, trying to ignore Spike as best he could, who was proceeding to microwave more blood in yet another one of his larger mugs.

Since no one decided to speak up then to puncture the uneasy silence, and since Spike got free from the bathtub on his own, Buffy proceeded to ask the room:“So, do you want me to wrangle Spike back into the bathtub or are we letting him roam the house now?” She let herself sound cheerful, as this situation with Spike was at least giving her a distraction from their current inability to puzzle out what was going on with the commando guys.

“I actually rather don’t mind getting the use of my shower back, but I’d like to have the padlock key back so that I can restrain him again at night,” Giles answered her gratefully. 

Xander could be heard grumbling from the couch, where he’d settled next to Anya, and right across from Willow: “Don’t know why we’re keeping him around. He’s pretty useless at giving us any sort of useable intel.”

While Anya, Xander and even Willow in the living room debated the continued presence of Spike, Buffy walked into the kitchen, and held out a palm outstretched towards the bleached blond vampire who just gave her single, weighty, unimpressed glance. “Spike, the key.” She added for unnecessary emphasis when he didn’t react further. She sensed something off with him, somehow. He had always been all bravado and posturing around her—she guessed that’s to be expected between mortal enemies—but he had never acted… _false_. Right now, with that hollow quality to his gaze, and with the darkness underneath his eyes, she was certain something about this vampire was off. Even his actions in the kitchen with Giles’ dish-ware seemed wrong somehow, like Spike was playing pretend. He seemed completely defeated. Perhaps he was ashamed of his need of their protection, of her protection?

So she watched Spike carefully, as he slowly reached into his pocket and pulled out the small metal key, dropping it disinterestedly into her palm before getting back to preparing his blood. She closed her hand over it and watched him pull out his mug of blood from the microwave as it beeped. She felt a vague nausea at the warm, almost coppery smell that filled the kitchenette, but she knew that Giles had only been feeding Spike pig, or even cow’s blood, so she tried not to let it show on her face. Showing too many emotions in front of Spike was always risky—you never knew which expression he would zero-in on and taunt her with.

“Slayer, you’re staring.” Spike muttered at her, holding the mug to his face and breathing in deeply. He was not really paying attention to her, and she was blocking his way out of the kitchen.

Wordlessly, she moved out of his way, and let him through.

“So, Buff,” Xander’s voice reached her from the living room, “What’s the latest on our plan for dealing with commando guys? Are we thinking they’re good guys, bad guys? They’re definitely fascists right?”

* * *

They still didn’t know anything more about the commandos than before the Scooby meeting, and whatever plan they did have could be summarily boiled down to a cautious but vague “be on your guard” and “look out for more clues.” Willow ended up leaving early to meet a study group at the college library, and Xander and Anya departed soon afterwards. Giles was working on a large map of Sunnydale in his living room, where he’d placed little pincushions in the locations where the commandos were sighted. It was a long shot, but it was possible that they might be able to find some interesting information, perhaps finding a pattern, or at least a common element, between the buildings or places.

Buffy sank into the couch, but felt something uncomfortable in her pocket digging into her leg. She pulled out her midterm paper, quite thick from being folded over several times, and thoughtlessly dropped it on the coffee table in front of her, on one of the many stacks of research books Giles had left lying around.

She regretted it instantly when Spike, who had made himself scarce during the Scooby meeting, swooped in without a sound and grabbed the rather crumpled midterm exam from atop the book pile. He took it with him as he sat in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table, the same armchair Willow had been sitting in before.

“Spike, give that back to me!” She protested, leaning forwards on the sofa and glaring at him.

“What’s this, Slayer, something interesting?”

He began to read it just as Buffy fought the urge to kick Giles’ coffee table towards him and attack him by surprise. That was not a rational response to what he just did, she reminded herself. This was the same Spike that attacked her in the school, that had attacked her mother, but right now… In any case, she knew she shouldn’t care less about what Spike thought about her failed midterm on nineteenth century poetry. What did he know about poetry, college, or midterms?

She had a sinking feeling in her stomach as the mean-spirited smirk on Spike’s face faded away into an expression of concentration as he flipped through the pages of her midterm. He eventually paused, on one of the middle pages, looking at her handwriting with an intensity that was hard to decipher. 

After a few interminable seconds, just as she was about to push herself off the couch and reclaim her midterm with extreme force, Spike began to read aloud, transfixed. Everything, from his accent to his tone, was different, and she barely recognized that this was the same Spike who had once plotted to kill her in fiery rampage of violence and destruction. 

“Others abide our questions. Thou art free. We ask and ask—thou smiles and art still, out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, planting his steadfast footsteps into the sea, making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place, spares but the cloudy border of his base to the foiled searching of mortality…” his voice trailed off, softer than she’d ever heard it, and he had a look on his face she had never seen before.

You get to know an enemy over the years—and you have to be able to read body language to stay alive as a Slayer.

This, however…She doesn’t know what to think about this. This was _so_ weird.

“I think your issue here is that your analysis is not being able to connect the fact that Arnold was a scholar, as well as a poet. He thought that Shakespeare, who at the time was considered the greatest English poet, had enjoyed much more freedom in his art than the poets of his own era, and that it itself was a source of its might and greatness. Freedom is not just about physical freedom, or the freedom of the natural world… It’s the freedom of being able to think in a way that is unrestrained and untrained by knowledge or education. It was pure creative freedom away from the conventions of the English critical and academic literary institutions that were stifling the modern art…”

Buffy’s jaw was hanging off her face as Spike finished speaking, and he put down her assignment on the coffee table. He saw her staring, then, and noticed her slack jaw and bewildered expression, and his countenance changed completely. His eyes narrowed considerably.

“Spike—” Buffy began to say, but her voice came out unsteady, not much louder than a whisper.

He didn’t wait for her to finish. He shot up off the armchair, walked over to the entrance of the apartment in a few long strides, pulled his packet of cigarettes out of his duster hanging by the door and left, slamming Giles’ front door shut behind him.

Giles, who had watched the entire situation unfold in complete silence, was looking at Buffy with a clouded, but curious frown. Buffy looked over at him, her jaw still dangling open.

“Most peculiar.” Giles said. “Was that a homework assignment of yours that he was looking at?”

“No. Well, yes. Sort of. It’s my midterm.” Buffy picked up the papers, which were starting to look a little worse for wear, up off the coffee table. She thought about putting them straight back into her bag, but instead decided to show them to Giles, figuring that that he probably wouldn’t berate her the “F” grade anymore than she was already berating herself. She handed him the midterm, which he flipped through carefully. To his credit, he only lingered on the bad grade for a fleeting moment.

“Most curious. Matthew Arnold’s poetry, I see, yes, the sonnet about Shakespeare. It’s quite famous.”

“Not in this century. I really messed up a big part of the analysis,” Buffy grumbled, leaning against the back of the couch near where Giles was sitting at his desk. She was looking a bit dejected herself, right then. Giles felt sympathy for the girl.

“Is it because you weren’t prepared, or…” he asked her, but there was a gentleness in his voice.

“The slayage was kind of intense that week. It was right before… well, it was right before Thanksgiving.”

“Understood,” was all Giles said in response, putting her midterm on the table. “It’s quite understandable, Buffy. Do you think you’ll be able to improve your grade by the final?”

Buffy visibly faltered a little at the thought of her looming poetry final. The weirdness with Spike had succeeded in distracting her from the negative thoughts regarding her poetry class. “I am honestly not sure.”

“It’s imperative that we get more information about this mysterious military group, I think, so that we can clear away your Slayer schedule in time for your exams. I would so like for your first semester of college to end on a good note.”

Buffy couldn’t stop a small smile from spreading on her face when he said that. Sometimes Giles said all the right kinds of things.

“I have a feeling we won’t be getting much closure on our commando friends anytime soon. I wish Spike would talk.”

Giles nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid we’ve exhausted him as a source. His descriptions are vague at best, and useless at worst. I daresay the experience might have troubled him… He really doesn’t seem the same, sometimes. This little moment with your poetry midterm confirms it for me.”

Buffy frowned, thinking for a brief moment before speaking up. “You mean, like, he’s traumatized or something? Can… vampires be traumatized?” Wasn’t there going to be a chapter on trauma in her psychology class? She wondered if she shouldn’t leaf through the section of the textbook when she got back to her and Willow’s dorm room.

“I suppose it’s possible. We know that Angel was quite, I would say, feral, when he returned from that hell dimension. Your descriptions of him right after his return when he first arrived back on earth seems to fit the bill for a certain amount of traumatization.”

“But Angel has a soul. Can you be traumatized without a soul? If you’re evil?”

“These are good points, Buffy, and good questions. I’m afraid I don’t know. Not for certain, in any case.”

Putting her midterm back in her shoulder bag, she wondered some more about Spike, and decided to reveal her train of thought to Giles.

“When exactly was Spike turned, Giles?”

Giles looked at her, a shred of surprise in his eyes as he raised his eyebrows. He leaned back in his chair, gently taking off his glasses and thought for a moment. “If I’m not much mistaken, shortly after 1880. Definitely during that decade.”

“Is it possible…” Buffy stopped herself, but Giles was able to pick up on her train of thought.

“Do you mean, is it possible he was a reader of poetry before he was turned?”

Buffy nods. 

“It does make one wonder,” her former Watcher said, placing his glasses on the desk. “He _was_ practically Matthew Arnold’s contemporary.” 

* * *

She found him outside, sitting in the dark. The light switches to turn on the electric lamps in Giles’ courtyard were actually situated inside his apartment, by the front door, and in any case Buffy figured he preferred the dark as a vampire. He was smoking. She wondered how he smoked with no breath—once upon a time, Angel had not been able to give her CPR because of that little issue—but she saw that all around him on the stone mosaic tiles of the courtyard were at least a half-dozen used cigarette butts lying around, so he must have figured out how to breathe somehow, even if he didn’t need to.

He didn’t look at her, didn’t taunt her, didn’t do anything.

Spike just inhaled and exhaled smoke.

Buffy stood by Giles’ front door, which she closed gently, and observed him for a moment. Without his leather coat he seemed thin, and smaller than he usually appeared. It was strange, if not somewhat disturbing, when she realised he really didn’t inspire any fear within her anymore.

“Spike.”

He looked up at her after a brief moment: “Why you still here? Come to throw it in my face?”

“You liked poetry as a human, didn’t you.” Buffy simply asked him, ignoring his lame attempt to spark trouble between them. Spike may not be able to help them much in figuring out what was going on with those military men, but she suddenly had other ideas how to put him to use. And, she had to admit, she was also curious. She was in fact very curious. She had no idea what Spike had been like as a human, and the moment with the poetry in Giles’ living room had thrown a total curve ball in her idea of what, or even _who_ , Spike was.

Spike growled—a proper vampiric growl that used to make the little hairs on her neck stand on end, but this time, at least, his face didn’t lose its human appearance. But he didn’t look at her yet, and threw his cigarette away, towards her feet, and proceeded to pointedly light another one, punctuating every little movement with a frustration that Buffy found pitiful. 

“So you did like poetry as a human,” Buffy guessed, unwilling to let the conversation end. She had a suspicion that if she didn’t say something now, Spike would never, ever own up to what he’d said in there, and then she’d never really know the bottom of it.

“What the fuck do you want from me, Slayer?” He sounded tired, but still angry.

She gave him a long look. He hadn’t left Giles’ courtyard, and he probably wanted to. He probably wanted nothing to do with any of them. But he was stuck. He had no money, no allies, no minions, and no way to defend himself from demons and humans alike. He was stuck with them, even if he was no longer chained to the bathtub.

“I’m…I know…” Buffy had no idea how to phrase it. This was probably a terrible idea. “How much do you know about Victorian and late Victorian poetry?”

His head snapped up and his eyes, blue, cold, furious, shone in the dark. Even with human sight, she found she could see them rather well in the dark of the courtyard.

“Because I’m guessing… you know a lot. Or…human you once did…”

Spike made an ugly grimace, then.

“I know you don’t…I mean…” Buffy inhaled, not really sure how she could phrase this in a way that wouldn’t wound her pride or his. Mortal enemies and all that. “If you…”

She wasn’t used to this silence between them—it was downright uncharacteristic of Spike. Maybe Giles was right. Maybe he was traumatized.

“Look, this is probably, like, one of the most awkward conversations I’m ever going to have, with anyone, ever. I can’t even believe I’m doing this. But I’m failing in my poetry class and if you would be willing… And I would never tell anyone. I wouldn’t even tell the others. Willow’s my usual study partner, but she’s really out of it lately since Oz left, and I could turn to Giles, but he’s working on figuring out who the military yahoos are…”

She found Spike’s blue eyes were still fixed on her, and it didn’t freak her out exactly, but it didn’t exactly stop the babble fest:

“My syllabus is basically covering a whole bunch of English poets…ummm… Arnold, William Blake, Wordsworth…umm… Byron too… Also umm… Cooler something?”

“Coleridge.” He interrupted her, but it wasn’t in the same soft tone as he’d used inside, earlier. His voice was like ice now.

“Yeah, that sounds right.”

They stood on opposing sides of the courtyard a little longer, but before long Buffy couldn’t stand it anymore. This was going nowhere. She’d get back to campus, and sometime in the next few days she’d find a study group, or maybe a tutor, who was human and _not_ undead and not nearly this awkward to be around. She’d probably have to tell Willow about her failing grade too. This had been a bad idea, and she briefly wondered what had gotten into her to think that Spike would have helped her with her coursework, of all things. Maybe a tiny, tiny part of her had been hoping that he’d be helpful like Angel? Which was a total fantasy: she saw that clearly now.

“Just how low do you think you can bring me?” Spike finally broke the silence, and his voice cut into her like a knife.

“Excuse me? I’m the one asking for your help! Which is clearly a terrible mistake.” Buffy scoffed.

“I’m a vampire, you stupid little bitch. Let’s set something bloody straight right now: I’m _not_ human, I’m _not_ one with your little Slayerettes squad, and _I don’t give a flying fuck about sodding human poetry_.” Spike had stepped towards her, but she didn’t tense. She calmly waited for him to finish, and then thought about punching him hard, really hard, in the face for calling her a bitch.

Instead, she readjusted her shoulder bag, looked at his fuming face without flinching, and said: “My mistake, Spike. It seems you really are just totally useless to me.”

She left, then, turning her back on him and walking straight out of the courtyard. Behind her, she heard a large crash as Spike had picked up a heavy cast iron garden chair and smashed it against stone tiles in fury. She shook her head as she got further and further away. Giles could handle the vampire in this state, at least for now, but he was going to become a problem for them, she could just feel it. He may be unable to fight or feed himself, but there were plenty of other ways of causing damage. Even if he was traumatized, and as Giles said, it was probable he couldn’t even be traumatized, it was likely that he would eventually figure out how to kill them, chip or no chip. She just honestly wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was. Wait for him to become a danger again before killing him, or killing him now before he had a chance to do anyone harm?


	2. Tentative Truce

It had been less than a week since the previous Scooby meeting at Giles’ apartment, and Buff's patrols were providing her with all the frustration and none of the satisfaction. Buffy had harboured suspicions before now, but now she was almost certain that those very same commandos that they kept seeing everywhere were responsible for the relative and uneasy quiet that had settled over Sunnydale. Even Willy down at the demon-and-supernatural-friendly bar on the wrong side of town was feeling a bit angsty about it, but no matter how many times she threatened to punch him he never had anything useful to say.

So, Sunnydale was calm. High school Buffy might have found the change of pace delightful once upon a time, but as she patrolled the small town’s dozens of empty, quiet cemeteries it just felt ominous, like something big was on the horizon. Something big brewing just under the surface of things—she just wasn’t sure what it was or how to get ready for it. And the problem with lots of waiting time with no action was that it made her feel anxious about being able to keep up with her classes. With all the fruitless legwork of wandering around looking for monsters who did not want to be found, she had no real distractions from thinking about her life outside of being the Slayer.

Buffy was doing okay in most of her classes, but she’d soured on the whole college experience. Her first freshman semester had clearly been filled with all sorts of ups and downs, and she felt a little worn out by the roller coaster ride. Also, unfortunately, she especially found Willow’s sadness affecting her.

Willow’s sadness was palpably disconnecting her from any enjoyment of everyday life, and Buffy didn’t know how to get Willow back into a college-loving mood. Willow was, thankfully, doing her homework and going to class, but she did it all with a kind of perfunctory hollowness Buffy found disquieting and—though she hated to admit it to herself—tiring. She’d always relied on Willow in the past to tether her to the college experience, but Buffy found that she was not quite sure she was able to do the same for Willow now that their situations were reversed. She just had no idea how to deal with Willow’s heartbreak. Her solution to Angel’s death had been running away to Los Angeles and isolating herself for months. When Angel had left the second time she’d been bracing herself for it, and trying to put everything in perspective: Buffy's high school sweetheart would not be with her after high school. She had kept reminding herself, over and over, that that was actually pretty normal for most college-bound teens her age, and Willow had been, of course, incredibly supportive. And then, much more recently, Buffy had been dealing with the Parker fiasco. Willow had been there, faithfully by her side, the first one to call Parker a jerk.

Buffy didn’t like feeling this selfish around her best friend. Now that it was Willow wallowing in a pit of despair, Buffy felt like she had nothing to offer her best friend. Any tactics for dealing with relationship grief that Buffy Summers had learned from her mother (chiefly ice cream, chocolate, and old men-free classic movies like Thelma and Louise) only went so far in distracting Willow from Oz’ departure. And when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was having issues, she usually liked to take them out on unsuspecting vampires.

Unfortunately, all of Sunnydale’s unsuspecting vampires seemed to all have agreed to go on holiday.

She walked back to her college dorm. She wasn’t looking forward to Willow being there. She’d been returning from patrol early enough lately to find Willow awake and listening to bad country music...what was it Xander always called it? The music of pain?

She stopped just outside their dorm room, alone in the empty hallway, and carefully pressed her ear against the thin wooden door.

She heard nothing.

Perhaps Willow was sitting on her bed in silence? Or she’d fallen asleep? Maybe studying with headphones?

She creaked open the door: “Willow?” she asked the dark room softly. There was no answer, and she couldn’t see or hear her roommate.

Sighing in relief, Buffy walked through the door, flipping the light switch. The artificial light flooded the room, and with it came the slight buzzing from the bulbs in the ceiling. The lights in the dorms were those same awful fluorescent ones like they used in the old high school, but at least her room was quiet, empty and country-music-free. If Buffy wasn’t going to get to beat up any vampires tonight, maybe she could enjoy a quiet evening. She might even get some studying done.

Buffy took a quick look at one of the white-board weekly organizers Willow kept above her desk, double-checking the carefully laid-out schedule in multi-coloured dry-erase markers. Tomorrow, first thing, Willow had her weekly chemistry lab. It made sense: sometimes Willow spent late evenings in the chemistry lab after most of the other students had left, and she was probably prepping for her class tomorrow morning. She would no doubt be back eventually.

Buffy pulled out a notebook from poetry class from the messenger bag at the foot of her bed and sat down gingerly on her mattress, leafing through to yesterday's notes. She had so much reading to catch up on.

Taking a quick look through her sparse handwriting, Buffy grumbled. She hadn’t even written down the readings to do this week. If she was lucky, the prof would stick to the schedule on the syllabus, otherwise she was screwed.

Digging through her book bag, she pulled out and double-checked the syllabus real quick. They were spending a bit more time looking over nineteenth century poetry with heavy Romantic tendencies this week.

“Hello Lord Byron…” she muttered to herself, getting comfortable on her stiff college mattress as she cracked open her textbook to the correct page.

Perhaps it was because she was restless and antsy, but she found it easier than expected to stay awake, even if the poetry was a little more flowery than she liked.

She was drawn out of her readings by the sound of unfamiliar heavy footsteps rapidly advancing through the hallway just outside her dorm room.

Then the door of her room swung open, slamming loudly against Willow’s desk, and within a split-second Buffy had already turned and grabbed Mr Pointy from beneath her pillow.

“Oh sod off with that. I come in truce, Slayer.”

Spike. It was Spike.

In her dorm room.

Buffy frowned. He had a bruise on his left cheek just under his eye, and looked a little worse for wear, giving his face an even more gaunt appearance than usual.

“How come you left Giles’ apartment? Wait—how did you get in here?”

“Red invited me in,” Spike said simply, looking around with curiosity. “Didn’t realise it was me I reckon.”

Buffy remembers Willow describing what had happened when Spike had first realised he couldn’t eat people anymore, after she had accidentally invited the murderous Spike into their dorm room.

“Does Gile know you’re here?” Buffy asked suspiciously.

“Dunno. He left for the evening, didn’t exactly let me in on his dinner plans,” Spike answered. He was standing by her desk, flipping through the psychology homework she had left that morning. "So, still flunking your english literature class, Slayer?” Spike had a shit-eating grin on his face. He seemed to find the whole idea delicious now that he was in what seemed to be a better, and thus much more annoying, mood.

Buffy groaned. “Get out, Spike, before I make you leave,” as she was saying the words she also realised she probably shouldn’t be leaving Spike unattended. “You know what? I’m taking you back to Giles’, and then I’m chaining you up to the bathtub in such a way that you won’t be able to move any of your limbs. Not even to operate the remote.”

Spike backed up then, his back to her desk, and raised his arms. His shit-eating grin had turned into a worried frown, but she definitely noticed that mischievous glimmer in his eyes had not left. “Oy, oy! What part of ‘I come in truce’ don’t you understand, Slayer? I have a…a business proposition for you.”

“A business proposition?”

“Yes,” Spike answered, easing a little and dropping his arms. He leaned against her desk. Every one of his actions seemed unbearably smug to Buffy, who was almost wishing Spike was chipped again so that they could stop this nonsense and get back to trying to kill each other.

“I’ll help you with your poetry. But I want to get paid.”

Buffy rolled her eyes at that. Now he wanted to help?

"I thought you didn’t care about human poetry," she answered him flatly.

"I don’t. But I know more than just a verse or two. And you know what I do care about, Slayer?”

“Proving that even a useless vampire like you is intellectually superior to the Slayer?” Buffy drawled out. Spike gave her a look.

“I care about money, you daft bint. Now that I’m on this fucking pig diet, I need money to eat. Can’t well kill my way through the butcher’s shop, now can I?”

“You’re disgusting, Spike.”

“This is a one-time offer, Slayer. I walk out of here, and it’s off the table, and for good this time.”

Buffy considered him, briefly. He had this impossible look on his face. He was far too pleased with himself, she thought. A few nights ago, he'd looked like he wanted to attack her for suggesting he help her with her poetry class. And now he’d found a way to turn it around so that Buffy was the one who felt like the complete idiot. She rationalised that he probably enjoyed having something she needed help with, and knew that he could help her with it.

But she hadn’t had time to find a tutor, and her term final was some short weeks away.

She wasn’t seriously considering this, was she?

“How much do you want?”

“How about I get paid 100 dollars a night?”

“100 dollars?!? Spike, I could hire a tutor for 10 dollars a session. I think Willow charges 15 an hour for tutoring in chemistry, but she’s a genius.”

Spike frowned. This was obviously not something he’d realised.

“Look, let's make a deal. I'll pay you 10 dollars an hour which is actually pretty good. My finals are in a few weeks, so we’d probably meet several times between now and then. You’ll have plenty of cash after for blood...and…cigarettes,” Buffy made a face at that. She wasn't sure if the grimace was about the cigarettes or because she was actually seriously considering this.

Spike seemed to think over her words, but he looked pensive and not angry, and then suddenly his growing grin was irritating her. "So, that’s a deal then, Slayer?”

Buffy thought about it one last time, keeping a practiced eye on Spike across the room as she did so. Spike was—or had been, at some point—a Victorian. He had a perspective she could use and she really didn’t want to fail this class. With so little slaying getting done, she was tired of failing academically on top of everything else.

Desperate times, desperate measures? This was a far cry from their very first truce, all those years ago, but at least now, if he found some way to weasel out of their deal, the fate of the universe wasn’t hanging in the balance. For some reason that realization didn't actually bring Buffy much comfort.

And, did she really want to spend more time with the evil bleached wonder?

“Oh, and there’s one more condition, Slayer.”

“What is it?” She narrowed her eyes.

“No one, and I mean, no one, hears about this or learns about this. Not even your little pal Red or any of the other Slayerettes.”

“Only if nobody hears that I flunked poetry and asked for your help," she responded quickly.

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Guess this is happening, then.” Spike said, “So, what are we starting with? Got anymore trite little essays you’d like me to look at?”

Shit.

“Let’s get out of here, first,” Buffy grumbled. “We’ll find a quiet place where Willow won’t happen to walk in on us in the next few minutes.”

Spike nodded, watching her pack up. She stuffed a poetry anthology, her notebook and some pens, as well as Mr Pointy into the canvas bag she sometimes brought with her on patrol. Spike’s eyebrows raised at Mr Pointy, which Buffy noticed out of the corner of her eye.

“I’m the Slayer, you’re the vampire. I don’t care that you’re leashed. I’m going to be armed and ready if we’re going to be working together.”

Spike shrugged, “Yes. Threaten to stake the useless vampire. That’s a fun game, especially when I’ve come to help you.”

“I’m paying you, remember. You’re not exactly doing this out of the evilness of your heart.” Buffy ground out. She shut the lights off of her dorm room as they left. She locked the door behind her.

“Well, yeah.”

Buffy shook her head, but then realised she didn’t exactly know where to go from here. She had spent very little time in the college library so far, and she didn’t know if Spike could get in at this hour without a student pass, and she really didn’t want to encourage any extra attention towards them if possible.

“Come on. The Bronze will be quieter than usual, with any luck we’ll find a quiet place to study.”

Spike’s scarred eyebrow shot up. “Poetry at the Bronze? Where everybody in Sunnydale and their grandmother will see us? It's not exactly laying low." Buffy looked at him, feeling suddenly self-conscious. She used to study at the Bronze all the time, back in high school. Granted, it was the kind of studying that had frequent dance breaks and fruity non-alcoholic drinks, as well as lots of staring dreamily at Angel…

She hadn't yet answered Spike. They were walking side-by-side out of the dorm, and out into the cool night air.

“I guess…” Buffy racked her brain for other places to study. The library was out. The Espresso Pump was not open this late. Giles would probably be home soon. “I guess we’ll go to my house. If it’s all right with your ego, we’ll just have to tell my mom about this…truce…arrangement.” She looked sideways at Spike, who made a face, but didn’t seem to disagree with her, “You have to promise to be on your best behaviour around my mom.”

Spike nodded a little sourly, and then all of a sudden perked up. Buffy watched the excitement on his face wearily. “Any chance your mum still has that hot chocolate with the little marshmallows in it?”

 

* * *

 

Joyce Summers blinked several times when she answered her door, recognizing immediately the bleached blond vampire and her daughter on the front porch. It was rather late in the evening for visitors, and to say that she had not expected this would be quite an understatement.

“Sorry, mom, didn’t mean to bother you so late,” Buffy spoke awkwardly, feeling super self-conscious in front of her mother’s startled gaze. She was kicking herself mentally too, since her mother had answered the door in her bathrobe and had clearly been either near or in bed. “I forgot my keys, and Spike and I…we have to…work somewhere quiet.”

“Buffy,” her mother swallowed, but then opened the door wider to let her daughter in. “Are you… is this another… is it an apocalypse?” Joyce looked at the vampire shrewdly. Spike, to his credit, didn’t fidget under her gaze.

“Of a sort, yeah,” Spike answered cheerfully.

“Spike!” Buffy spun around to face him, glaring. “Don’t frighten my mom for kicks!”

“Oh,” Spike seemed to catch himself then, and though he certainly looked a little more contrite for the sake of her mother, Buffy had a feeling he was still putting on a show for his own amusement. “But not to worry, Joyce, nothing I can’t handle. The Slayer came to the best.”

Joyce glanced at her daughter, and then back at the vampire, then back at her daughter. He could tell by Joyce’s furrowed brow that she was perturbed by their appearance, which Spike found thrilling. He assumed that Joyce had not been informed of the small problem of having a government-issue chip shoved up his brain. And unbeknownst to both Buffy and her mother, Spike, who was still hovering at the threshold of the Summers’ entrance, was actually testing the barrier of their house, concluding that somehow the Slayer had somehow neglected to un-invite him in the months since he’d left Sunnydale. Too bad he hadn’t realised that much earlier.

“Should I be worried, Buffy?” Joyce asked finally. Buffy shook herself out of her awkward silence, trying to give her mother her most reassuring face.

“No! Mom, no, no. It’s okay. I promise. Come in, Spike,” she said as she glanced towards the vampire, before facing her mother again, “He’s just helping me out with a project. We have a truce. It’s not end-of-the-world stuff, but I do need his help. Can we work in the dining room?”

Joyce nodded. “I’ll just move some of my papers from the gallery. Are you hungry? Can I fix you anything?”

Buffy was about to respond in the negative, when Spike intervened smoothly: “Got anymore of those little marshmallows that go so well in hot chocolate? I could really go for a mug or two of that, Joyce.”

“Sure, Spike. I’ll see what we’ve got. Anything for you, Buffy?” Joyce answered, if a little hesitantly. When Buffy shook her head and refused, Joyce left them for the kitchen, leaving the vampire and the Slayer standing alone in the entrance of the house.

“Don’t make my mom make you snacks!” Buffy snapped at Spike in a stage whisper. “It’s super late and she has work in the morning.”

“Your mother offered,” Spike grinned.

“She offered that to me! Not you!”

“How was I supposed to know that? Can’t fault a bloke for wanting a bit of kindness after the last few weeks I’ve just had.” Spike sounded chipper and looked smug. Buffy just scowled at him, crossing her arms and turning to look into the dining room. “Come on, let’s get this show on the road, Slayer.”

The two of them walked towards the large dining table, and took up a corner to themselves. Buffy didn’t want to sit next to him—close proximity with a former vampire nemesis was unsettling—but sitting just across from him would have to do for tutoring.

Buffy realised that the two of them were just sitting there, seconds ticking by in glorious awkwardness. She didn’t know how to start. She could hear Joyce opening cabinets in the kitchen.

“So, who’s the ponce you’re studying this week, Slayer?”

The sentence seemed enough to stir Buffy out of her stupor. This situation was real, and she was really doing this.

“Byron,” Buffy said, taking out her class materials and her textbook and placing them on the table between them. Spike leaned over his corner of the table and fished out her syllabus, scanning it quickly with his eyes.

“So the Byron poem for this week is ‘When We Two Parted’ and ‘Darkness’,” Buffy finished saying quietly, opening her textbook to the correct page.

For a brief moment, Buffy and Spike stared at the open book, neither of them really knowing what to do next. Buffy swallowed her pride, but couldn’t quite shake the misgivings in the back of her mind telling her that this was probably going to be a disaster. At worst, he was using this opportunity to learn just how much of an academic failure Buffy was. At best, she was actually going to rely on a vampire’s knowledge of poetry to survive her final exam.

Buffy thought it was a good thing that Spike wanted nobody to ever hear about this. Ever.

“So. ‘When We Two Parted’ seems like the pretty standard breakup poem, but you know… old-timey and stuff…” Buffy broke the awkward silence first.

“You’ve read it before?” Spike asked her.

“Just before you got to my dorm tonight. Have you?”

“I’ve been around for a bloody century and a half. Happen to have picked up a book or two.”

Buffy nodded, frowning at the open textbook. “At least this one is pretty straightforward. The reading analysis I’m supposed to write up for class only needs to be 350 words, but I keep getting marks taken off because apparently I’m too superficial—”

Spike snorted.

“—in my _analysis_ ,” Buffy pointedly ignored the vampire, “But honestly,” and at this Buffy huffed, leaning back against the wooden dining room chair, “I’m pretty sure the professor is making up most of the stuff she says in class. Why does everything in poetry have to be a metaphor of a metaphor of a metaphor?”

Spike raised one scarred eyebrow. She watched as he slid the textbook closer to him on the table so that he could read the poem more easily. She also noticed then, that sometime between the last time she’d noticed and now, he had fixed the black nail polish on his fingernails, and it no longer looked chipped and broken.

He read the poem once, rather quickly, and then she watched his blue eyes return to the top of the page and begin once more to scan the page at a more measured pace. Something happened to his face then, Buffy immediately noticed. Spike didn’t have much of a poker face, at least, most of the time she found the vampire pretty straightforward…and evil. But re-reading the poem, he looked a little bit less like the man who had tried to kill her once, and a little more…

Buffy recognized the face, suddenly. It was the face she’d seen him make when he was looking at, or speaking of, Drusilla. The expression on Spike’s face wasn’t happy, wasn’t even content, but something about it seemed…nostalgic?

“Sometimes,” Spike said, tearing her from her train of thought. His voice sounded a little different from what she was used to, as well, but she couldn’t figure out why: “It’s not about what it means. It’s about the sensations created by the verse, by the words. Listen to this carefully.”

To her immense shock, Spike began reciting the verse:

 

When we two parted

In silence and tears,

Half broken-hearted

To sever for years,

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

 

The dew of the morning

Sunk chill on my brow—

It felt like the warning

Of what I feel now.

Thy vows are all broken,

And light is thy fame;

I hear thy name spoken,

And share in its shame.

 

They name thee before me,

A knell to mine ear;

A shudder comes o’er me—

Why wert thou so dear?

They know not I knew thee,

Who knew thee too well—

Long, long shall I rue thee,

Too deeply to tell.

 

In secret we met—

In silence I grieve,

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

If I should meet thee

After long years,

How should I greet thee?—

With silence and tears.

 

As the poem ran out of words, Spike let the air fill with a weighty silence. Buffy looked up at him, her brow furrowed and eyes were fixed on the vampire. Buffy never thought of herself as particularly perceptive (outside of a fight to the death with the undead, of course) but she was now certain she had figured out why Spike sounded different when he recited poetry like that. It was his accent that had changed—she was sure of it, even though she didn’t actually know much at all about British or English accents. But there had been words he’d said that reminded her of the way Giles said them. Was that what Spike had sounded like before he was a vampire? Angel had once had an Irish accent, before he got to the United States—he’d told her about it, a long time ago. It was utterly possible that Spike's accent had changed over the century and a half he'd been alive as well. 

Spike grinned slightly at Buffy’s focused stare, not unnerved in the slightest. He figured she must be reacting to the way he had read the poem, and it pleased him to no end.

In didn’t take long, not even half a minute, before both the vampire and the slayer realised that they had an audience. Joyce, carrying a now almost cool mug of hot chocolate, was standing in the small passage between the kitchen and the dining room, her jaw dangling open as she stared at the vampire that had just recited poetry to her daughter.


End file.
